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September 8: Bone Machine By Tom Waits Was Released in 1992

“it ain’t no sin, to take off your skin and dance around in your bones”
~Tom Waits

From Wikipedia:

Released

September 8, 1992

Recorded

Prairie Sun Recording, Cotati, California

Genre

Rock, experimental rock, blues rock

Length

53:30

Label

Island

Producer

Tom Waits

Bone Machine is a critically acclaimed and award-winning album by Tom Waits, released in 1992 on Island Records. It won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album, and features guest appearances by Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo, Primus’ Les Claypool, and The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards.

Bone Machine marked a return to studio material for Waits, coming a full five years after his previous studio album, Franks Wild Years (1987). The album is often noted for its dark lyrical themes of death and murder, and for its rough, stripped-down, percussion-heavy blues rock style.

Recording & production:

Bone Machine was recorded and produced entirely at the Prairie Sun Recording studios in Cotati, California in a room of Studio C known as “the Waits Room,” in the old cement hatchery rooms of the cellar of the buildings.

Mark “Mooka” Rennick, Prairie Sun studio chief said:

[Waits] gravitated toward these “echo” rooms and created the Bone Machine aural landscape. […] What we like about Tom is that he is a musicologist. And he has a tremendous ear. His talent is a national treasure.

Waits said of the bare-bones studio, “I found a great room to work in, it’s just a cement floor and a hot water heater. Okay, we’ll do it here. It’s got some good echo.” References to the recording environment and process were made in the field-recorded interview segments made for the promotional CD release, Bone Machine: The Operator’s Manual, which threaded together full studio tracks and conversation for a pre-recorded radio show format.

Artwork:

The cover photo, which consists of a blurred black-and-white, close-up image of Waits in a leather skullcap with horns and protective goggles, was taken by Jesse Dylan, the son of Bob Dylan.He wears this same outfit in the video for “Goin’ Out West” and “I Don’t Wanna Grow up”.

Reviews:

…….. Throughout the album lonesome travelers and restless strangers battle their lives with drink, religion and the active search for somewhere better than here. “A little trouble makes it worth the going/And a little rain never hurt no one/The world is round/And so I’ll go around/You must risk something that matters,” Waits sings on “A Little Rain,” with David Phillips’s pedal steel sweeping through the background. No one needs convincing.It’s a song older than Waits himself — older than Hank Williams, older than Robert Johnson — that Waits is chasing, the simple mystery of where life goes: “I don’t wanna float a broom/Fall in love and get married and then boom/How the hell did it get here so soon?/I don’t wanna grow up.” Albums this rich with spiritual longing prove the validity of that effort, no matter the odds.
Read more @ Rob O’Connor – Rolling Stone Magazine

Perhaps Tom Waits’ most cohesive album, Bone Machine is a morbid, sinister nightmare, one that applied the quirks of his experimental ’80s classics to stunningly evocative — and often harrowing — effect. In keeping with the title’s grotesque image of the human body, Bone Machine is obsessed with decay and mortality, the ease with which earthly existence can be destroyed. The arrangements are accordingly stripped of all excess flesh; the very few, often non-traditional instruments float in distinct separation over the clanking junkyard percussion that dominates the record. It’s a chilling, primal sound made all the more otherworldly (or, perhaps, underworldly) by Waits’ raspy falsetto and often-distorted roars and growls. Matching that evocative power is Waits’ songwriting, which is arguably the most consistently focused it’s ever been. Rich in strange and extraordinarily vivid imagery, many of Waits’ tales and musings are spun against an imposing backdrop of apocalyptic natural fury, underlining the insignificance of his subjects and their universally impending doom. Death is seen as freedom for the spirit, an escape from the dread and suffering of life in this world — which he paints as hellishly bleak, full of murder, suicide, and corruption. ..
-Allmusic – Steve HueyRead more over @ allmusic

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